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Canonization of Pope John Paul II - An Outsider's View from Poland

Here where I live in Poland there is a intense renewal of the public expression of love and devotion to this great Polish religious figure, one of the rare world famous Polish historic beings apart from Fryderyk Chopin, Ignacy Paderewski, Madame Curie and possibly General Sikorski.

Large television screens have been set up in squares in the cities throughout the country where people have come together to watch the unprecedented simultaneous canonization of these two popes in Rome, Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II. This unique ceremony performed by the equally unprecedented presence of two living Popes, Pope Francis and the Emeritus Pope Benedict. Here in Warsaw instead of a number of cliched, no doubt platidudinous observations on my part after standing in the misty damp among crowds of an early spring morning, I will let Pope Francis speak in superior words of great simplicity pregnant with meaning which expresses the predominant feeling among the crowds in Pilsudski Square. Parties, music concerts and celebrations will continue far into the Warsaw night.

'They were priests, bishops and popes of the 20th century. They lived through the tragic events of that century, but they were not overwhelmed by them,' he said.

'John XXIII,' he said, 'was a pastor to the church, a servant leader' who had called the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II was 'the Pope of the family'.

Pope John Paul II now as 'The Saint of the Family' will hopefully become a uniting force in Poland who will once again bring family and national consciousness together as a cohesive spiritual unit. The country desperately needs the uniting notion of Christian brotherhood, empathy and compassion in the personal, economic and political sphere as was embodied in every utterance that Pope John Paul II made during his extraordinary life. Consensus and brotherly compromise are rarely encountered outside of the family in one of the most fervently Catholic countries of Europe. Here in 2014 many Polish politicians profess Christian principles but their self-interested actions belie them. In a country that could be a model for Europe, so many in the wider community seem to be at each other's throats and behave with a principle of 'Hate thy neighbour' rather than the Roman Catholic prescription I was taught at school which was to 'Love thy neighbour as thyself'. This has always been a deep mystery to me considering the unparalleled human sacrifices and suffering of Poland in recent wars. In peacetime the country and its glorious dead deserve far better than a kitsch political display on the part of too many 'professionals'. The canonization of Pope John Paul II is surely one of the very few catalysts that might, just might achieve some degree of national cohesiveness and consensus in Poland apart from the valiant courage that unified the country in the face of external aggression. There was once a famous Polish aphorism 'For Your Freedom and Ours'. Where is the spirit of this sentiment today?

Let us hope that this quite extraordinary day will be a symbolic form of reconciliation to all faiths throughout the world as this great man, a prodigious soul, would have striven and hoped for were he alive. Today we are confronted and witness, at the very same instant of time as this canonization, murderous confrontations between the West and the Arab world, that once highly civilized society now tortured by divisions within its own Muslim faith, confrontations of a medieval, slaughterous and barbarous nature, a denial of any civilization worthy of the name.

Suffer the little children of Syria as they are trapped by rapacious adults, maimed, orphaned by the hundreds of thousands, dispossessed and snuffed out as innocents....the prescient Christ knew much of this.

We have no moral beacons today of the stature of John Paul II whatever attitude you may hold towards his controversial policies and conventional weaknesses as a man, no matter what your faith, agnosticism or atheism. His charismatic and rare ability to communicate moral goodness far outweighed his few omissions. The effectiveness of Christian principles are underestimated in their simple utility both in business and life itself. Mendacity and the criminal mind create complex and labyrinthine subterfuge which simply do not work effectively in the long run. Why cannot people see this simple truth? There is nothing 'spiritual' in this dimension of the Christian faith but simple utility. Christianity is an excellent way to live on a simple practical level. The perversion of Christian values we see today will bring down on our heads Old Testament destruction. We are of a human nature and our qualities will always be weighed in a balance at the conclusion of this theatre we call life. In the wider world love is already being transformed into the pornography of bottoms and bosoms, priests exposed as paedophiles, altruism disappears into achieving simply pass examination grades, superficial celebrity and cheap thrills, politics degenerates into the exhibitionist gestures of a poor playwright, religion into an activity mocked as being restricted to the financially deprived or those of limited intelligence, medical science exploits the profitable business of harvesting the fear of mortality by the gullible, neglect of the old and terminally ill as useless scarcely human detritus, economics as the new religion, its abiding sin the failure of fallible individuals to invest shrewdly - all these matters ruled over by the baleful shadows of a wild dance around the golden calf. In his visionary science fiction radio play The Mission of the Vega (1954) the great Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt presciently describes a world where conflicting ideologies have brought the world to the brink of World War Three. The moon is in Russian hands. The West sends envoys to recruit aid from the penal colony on Venus, only to learn a hard lesson in morality from the sub-culture which has evolved out of the brutal living conditions there. He has one of his characters comment: 'The earth seduces to inequality.'And another reminds us: 'The human being is something precious and his life is an act of grace.' I feel the scales of Pope John Paul II tip significantly in the direction of the expression of moral goodness and cultural empathy as far as such is possible on this terrifyingly unequal earth. We should, indeed must, learn from his example.Homily over...

As an Australian author and sadly a non-practising Roman Catholic I can only offer today the concluding pages of my literary travel book about Poland (in English and Polish too - scroll down) and a charming picture of John Paul II in Brisbane on November 25, 1986 found by chance in George Weigal's great biography of the former Pope so appropriately entitled Witness to Hope.

The Blessed John Paul II in Brisbane Australia 25 November, 1986

From A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland

Michael Moran (Granta Books, London 2010) pp. 333-335

Grief rose from the stones of the city. Radio stations and television

channels cancelled their scheduled programmes and selected the

most lugubrious music of Chopin and Bach. The death vigil of the

first Polish Pope was one of silent waiting and many tears. I saw

three skinheads with prominent tattoos swagger into a church,

machismo dissolving before the golden tabernacle as they knelt and

prayed. In the words of a Vatican announcement, this saintly figure,

the great patriot, the man of political controversy was ‘closer now to

God than to man’.

The measure of this selfless humanist is illustrated by the story ofthe cat. On the day he was to return to Rome in 1978 for the secondPapal Conclave, an elderly lady knocked at the door of his residencein Kraków. In a state of great distress she told him she had lost hercat and believed the neighbours had stolen it. Could CardinalWojtyła help her? He immediately drove to the neighbour’s house,commandeered the cat and returned it to the ecstatic old woman,only minutes later pressing on to the airport and the immortality ofthe papacy.I wandered the streets of Warsaw in the small hours ponderingthe spiritual and political revolution Pope John Paul II had catalysedin Poland on his first pilgrimage to the country in the summer of1979. It was then he uttered the eloquent biblical phrases ‘Be notafraid’ and ‘Renew the face of the earth’, which were taken deep intothe hearts of the millions of Poles who joined him in prayer in theopen fields outside town and city. He transformed this fragmentedsociety. The regime feared him as a dangerous enemy although paradoxicallythey assisted their own suicide by helpfully planning hispilgrimage. During the celebrations a miner was asked the use ofreligion in a communist state and succinctly replied, ‘To praise theMother of God and to spite those bastards!’The force of the Pope’s own language and faith unified thefractious Poles and inspired Solidarność to action. He transfiguredtheir consciousness. He returned them to a sense of fidelity andhonour. He had learned the power of words to alter the world whilestudying Polish literature and during the Nazi occupation as amember of the clandestine Rhapsodic Theatre. Any young man whocould write subversive plays and remain imperturbable during aclandestine performance of the national epic Pan Tadeusz whileNazi propaganda blared in the streets below was not going to beruffled by mere communist commissars. As Archbishop of Krakówhe had ordered that George Orwell’s 1984 be read in churches. AsPope he used Christian metaphors to impart his revolutionary message.Lies had made it impossible for the communists to rule Polandeffectively. ‘Fifty per cent of the collapse of communism is hisdoing,’ commented Lech Wałęsa, the leader of the Solidarity movementthat overturned communism in Poland, the beginning of anirreversible process.A candle burned in the window of the Pope’s Vatican residence asan outward and very public sign of his spiritual bond with thenation. The people no longer felt humiliated by foreign dominationbut moulded ‘the inalienable rights of dignity’ from traditionalPolish cultural values of sacrifice and resistance. These same spiritualvalues had preserved their country in the mind’s heart over hundredsof years.Bells tolled and sirens wailed through the reconstructed streets ofthe Old Town at the final moment. It was 2 April 2005. Six days ofofficial mourning followed. Bank websites were edged in black andeverything was cancelled that smacked of pleasure. Consumption ofalcohol and ice-cream was forbidden. Shrines began to materialize inparks and at war memorials. The infatuation of this society withdeath was at its most intense, the supermarkets piled high withfuneral candles. Entire streets were lined with them enclosed in thecharacteristic glass funnels of red, yellow and white – the nationalcolours of Poland and the Vatican. Knots of people, curiously lackingan air of expectancy, stood silently behind these flickering rowsof light waiting for a procession that would never pass. Entiresquares and window ledges shimmered in the darkness. Simplybeing together in the national family ‘nest’ at this moment appearedof overriding importance. This ‘Polish Pope’ was symbolically farmore significant to Poles than simply head of the Church of Rome.He was a conspicuous example of that rare species, a successful Poleof world power and influence.Polish eagles and the national flag, entwined with that of theVatican, were draped in black ribbons. Established wartime traditionsreturned to life in this unprepossessing yet most courageous ofcapitals. SMS messages were sent in a mysterious and secret communicationnetwork. A directive for the population to meet at thisor that place, line with candles this or that street associated withJohn Paul II, extinguish all the city lights at a particular moment. Iobeyed my SMS message to switch off my home lights at 11.00pm.However I noticed on my estate many lights still burning at theappointed time. ‘Bloody foreigners!’ I found myself muttering as Iattended to the funeral candle on the terrace.His successor Pope Benedict XVI made a pilgrimage to Poland inMay 2006 following in the footsteps of his mentor, the man heassured the assembled hundreds of thousands would very soon becanonized as a saint. Outside the Presidential Palace in Warsaw Ifound myself among a group of nuns bobbing about in the breezyshowers like so many raucous gulls. All around me massive crowdsof Poles were willing the German Benedict to be the reincarnationof John Paul.At Oświęcim (Auschwitz) a grim, determined German inwindswept robes of white and gold walked alone towards the infamousBlack Wall where mass executions took place. This reluctantformer member of the Hitler Youth was visibly straining to supportan intolerable burden of history. In a formidable act of reconciliation,he kissed and caressed a group of survivors who wereassembled in an orderly row.

At prayers in the extermination camp of Birkenau the rain ceasedand a rainbow appeared over the barracks, the crematoria and thesymbolic watchtower penetrated by the railway line leading to theloading ramp of death. The spring sun shone full upon him as he satlistening to the singing of the mournful Hebrew lament for the dead.The Middle Ages would have deemed it a miracle.

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Australian author and classical musician.
He seriously studied the piano and harpsichord in London for many years.
His piano teacher was Eileen Ralf, a former professor at the Royal Academy of Music and the inspiring teacher of the great Australian pianist Geoffrey Tozer.
His harpsichord teacher was Maria Boxall, editor of the keyboard works of the English Baroque composer and organist John Blow as well as a renowned Harpsichord Method.
He yearns for the South Pacific islands but through a number of unlikely events and coincidences beached up on the cold shores of the Baltic.